I've banned laptops in class for years: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distract... . In most cases, the scarce resource today is attention, depth, and concentration, not information or whatever else laptops may provide access to.

Are students allowed to appeal? When I moved from hand-written notes to LaTeX notes entirely, I anecdotally found that it improved my immediate understanding of the material. For example, when the professor is doing a sketch on the board and you make hand-written notes, you quickly copy the sketch and forget about it. When you do it in LaTeX, you have to think about how to translate the sketch into TikZ commands as fast as possible because the board could be wiped any minute. It requires me to distill the core ideas out of these sketches much more quickly than the average student, and that helped me quite a lot.

(It should be noted that I don't say that any student will benefit from writing their notes in LaTeX. 90-99% will be absolutely lost when the first big formula appears, and that's before you get to figures describing tree algorithms.)

EDIT: Just saw the link in the article to another article about a study where hand-written notes resulted in better recall. Must be just me then.

These studies compare to standard Word writing, you wrote your notes in LaTeX, which is vastly different IMO.

Not many people know TikZ well enough to spin circuit diagrams or integration contours from a class on analysis as fast as a professor can draw them on a board. While I'm skeptical that you managed this, if you did, you're a rare talent.

Probably. I spent 11 years at university (six for a full-time physics degree, five for a part-time CS bachelor), and started writing notes in LaTeX after a few weeks. Initially, we were a team of three: two took turns in LaTeX, and one took notes by hand to find and fix errors afterwards (e.g. when unknown symbols were used; this was before DeTeXify existed iirc).

After a year or so, we ditched the handwritten notes, and moved to a rotation between writing and proofreading. Images were still copied on paper only, tagged with an ID on paper and where it should appear in LaTeX, and drawn in Inkscape after the lecture.

I only really learned TikZ during my final physics thesis. When I started the CS degree, I was comfortable enough with it to stop bringing paper to class. (Also, I was now working alone, since my two collaborators moved on to other things.)

If I recall correctly, one theory as to why hand written notes are better is because they're slower, forcing you to get to the core of the professor's lecture. So in other words, exactly the same reason LaTeX notes worked for you.

If you pay attention, anything will help you recall. But if the medium you choose also contains it's own distractions (chat apps, email, hacker news) it will hurt the recall of those who fall under their sway.

Perhaps the real problem is forcing students to sit through lectures they don't care about in order to get information that is easily available in books or videos.

That information is available to them now. I don't find that they get it.

I am learning a musical instrument. My practice is much more reliable when I have weekly lessons.

People are funny. Not haha funny. Complicated funny.

I wholeheartedly agree. But the (at least American) education system is build around obtaining checkmarks on a degree audit so you can get the credentials to get a job. I think its a deep issue and you have to start with simpler problems near the top rather then heading straight to 'break the wheel'.

Most people are not cut out to learn like Good Will Hunting.

I don't think you need to be exactly a genius in order to watch videos on the internet. It requires even less effort than attending a lecture, and has many benefits (cheaper, you can literally replicate the best lecturer in the universe for everyone, you can rewatch inifinite amount of times...).

Videos are generally much more boring to watch than a live teacher. I definatley don't expect students to watch the same 1 hour video twice.

But what's the alternative? I see this sentiment repeated all the time and no one offers any workable alternatives.

The alternative should be to make more classes elective and provide less rigorous versions.

There's really no point teaching most kids anything beyond the basics of most subjects.

Spend more of our resources on motivating subjects & topics, rather than just telling kids to learn things.

If the kids aren't interested in learning what you're teaching, it doesn't matter what you're teaching anyway, you're just creating stress on everyone for no reason.

Maybe I'm extrapolating too much from my own experiences, but I lost nothing when I dropped physics because my teacher was an asshat, nor from sticking with chemistry because my teacher was a non-asshat.